Ai no borei (Im Reich der Leidenschaft)

Nagisa Ōshima

November 6 to 30, 2009

 

For a quarter-century, from 1960 onwards, Nagisa Ōshima was Japan’s most acclaimed modern filmmaker. An icon of the cultural upheaval that marked the 1960s and 70s, he was perceived in the West as a kind of Far Eastern Godard, while in Japan he was regarded as the voice of a young generation whose rebellion foreshadowed the changes that would soon overtake society-at-large. His films often employed sex and violence to combat the conformity and hypocrisy of Japanese society. After the subversive, Buñuel-inspired Max mon amour (1986), however, very little was heard from the director. He made two documentaries for the BBC and in 1999 directed the monumental Gohatto (Taboo), a period Samurai film starring Takeshi Kitano that explored homosexual themes. After suffering a stroke in February 1996, Ōshima could no longer fully endure the strain of a film shoot, so his son began working closely by his side.
 
In 2009, a rediscovery of Ōshima is well overdue. Only a few of his films are still (if rarely) shown today: Naked Youth (1960), In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) – just three works from an immeasurably rich, complex and exuberant œuvre which has remained virtually hidden for some 20 years. The current Ōshima retrospective – consisting of newly struck prints, for the most part – is therefore not just a wonderful opportunity but also a revelation: Ōshima’s cinema turns out to be far more fascinating and diverse, more experimental and more entertaining than previously thought.
 
Born in 1932, Nagisa Ōshima ended up in film purely by chance. The scion of a family with samurai ancestry, he studied law but was unable to find a job after graduation, thanks to his reputation as a ‘radical.’ In the spring of 1952 Ōshima had been one of the ringleaders of the student movement against the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty (AMPO). On a friend’s recommendation, Ōshima took an exam to become an assistant director – and suddenly found himself with a job at the Shōchiku Ōfuna studios. When Shōchiku in the late 50s started looking for fresh talent to invigorate its declining fortunes, Ōshima was given the chance to direct his first feature, Ai to kibō no machi (A Town of Love and Hope, 1959). Although the studio executives didn’t approve of the result, the film was a critical success and paved the way for the “Shōchiku New Wave.” In the following year, no less than five former assistants made their feature directing debuts. Two of these, Masahiro Shinoda and Yoshishige Yoshida, developed into very important filmmakers in their own right, while a third, Tamura Tsutomu, became a screenwriter and one of Ōshima’s key collaborators.
 
Ōshima always rejects any representation of himself as the founder of a movement. More accurately, the Shōchiku New Wave was a convergence of various innovative strands in Japanese film culture. For example, Ōshima's trio of masterpieces made in 1960 – Naked Youth, The Sun’s Burial and Night and Fog in Japan – owe as much to the formal subversions of several upstart genre filmmakers at Nikkatsu and Tōei as to the radical changes taking place in documentary films at that time. Herein lies the key to the uniqueness of Japan’s cinematic “revolution” in the late 50s and early 60s: in hardly any other national cinema of this era was there a comparable cross-fertilization between traditionally distinct spheres of production.
 
All this should be kept in mind to properly assess Ōshima’s genius: his films feed off the energy released by the collision of seemingly heterogeneous elements. Those of his works that have impressed critics with their formal rigor, such as Death by Hanging (1968), Boy (1969), or The Ceremony (1971), offer just one of many perspectives on this kaleidoscopic body of work, just as his free flowing, “documentary-like” essays – Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968) or The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970) – utilize another, similarly unrepresentative approach. At its core, Ōshima's art is an act of permanent destabilization. It is an art of movement and of searching, not stasis. The only consistency one can find is the way that Ōshima questions and reinvents himself, only to rediscover himself anew in the next film, or the one after that.
 
One point of entry into this saga of furious self-transformation is precisely through those Ōshima films which have not been adequately acknowledged so far; works whose rawness and bold embrace of pop styles and everyday life forcefully contradict the prevailing critical view: films such as A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songsand Double Suicide: Japanese Summer, both from 1967; Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968); as well as the completely “atypical” dark satire The Pleasures of the Flesh (1965) and the historical Anime, Tales of the Ninja (1967). Another way to summarize it would be to use the Trotskyite phrase: Ōshima's cinema is the permanent revolution.
 
The first complete retrospective of Ōshima’s films in more than 20 years was initiated by James Quandt (Cinematheque Ontario) and coordinated in Europe by the Austrian Film Museum and BFI Southbank. The retrospective will also travel to Helsinki, Edinburgh, Turin and Zurich. The series has been supported by The Japan Foundation, The Kawakita Memorial Film Institute and the Japanese Embassy in Vienna.